UC professors: Students aren’t ready for college math. What data shows
Thousands of University of California academics have made the claim that too many students are showing up unprepared for the rigors of college calculus and other subjects, a problem they say has worsened since the UC campuses stopped using the SAT and ACT scores in fall 2021 for admissions.
Those beliefs, however, are lacking data to back them up, according to independent and other UC researchers.
What the numbers do show, they say, is that a large segment of students were not ready for college courses, including first-year calculus, well before the UC campuses ditched the admissions tests.
At the heart of the heated battle over a return to the SAT and ACT are basic questions: Are the UC campuses admitting more unprepared students because of test-blind admissions? And if the admissions tests are required once again, will the scores shift who gets a seat?
Despite the concerns over student readiness, first-year GPAs, student retention, graduation rates or course units completed remained relatively steady after the elimination of the testing requirement, according to a UC 2025 study of admissions of the 2021 and 2022 freshmen.
“I see little evidence that bringing the SAT back is going to change anything,” said Jesse Rothstein, UC Berkeley professor of public policy and economics. “This new data doesn’t show it.”
